Name: Junta Nakai | Databricks
Uploaded: 2024-06-11T16:00:00.000Z
Duration: 15 min 3 s

Clips
News
More from AWS Financial Services Symposium

Junta Nakai

VP, Global Head of Financial Services, Cyber Security and Sustainability GTM

Databricks

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium

Cloud spending in the financial services industry has been on a growth curve, and Amazon Web Services Inc. has gained momentum in this sector. For financial services companies, broader cloud adoption has led to a heightened focus on data and new ways to organize and manage vast amounts of information to create intelligent solutions using AI.How the financial world is leveraging data to transform operations and increase customer value was a central focus of theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, provided insights through interviews with company executives, customers and partners. (* Disclosure below

Overcoming adoption hurdles: The future of generative artificial intelligence in finance

The AWS Financial Services Symposium has made it clear that the world of financial services is undergoing a massive shift, driven by generative artificial intelligence. The future of AI in finance has led some to feel overwhelmed, while others are nothing but excited about the road ahead.Generative artificial intelligence has the ability to transform financial services in a way that hasn’t been seen for decades, according to Junta Nakai (pictured), vice president and global head of financial services, sustainability and cybersecurity go to market at Databricks Inc. That’s important, given studies that have shown that Millennials would rather go to the dentist than to the bank

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Financial Services: Harnessing Gen AI to Elevate Personalization and Enhance Customer Experience

play_circle_outline Importance of modernizing tech stack and democratizing data and AI

play_circle_outline Innovative Banking Experiences and Revenue Streams: Opportunities and Challenges for Incumbents in the Future

Info

Junta Nakai | Databricks

Junta Nakai

VP, Global Head of Financial Services, Cyber Security and Sustainability GTM Databricks

>> The AWS Financial Services Symposium, presented by theCUBE.

>> Good morning, nerd family, and welcome to New York City. We're here at AWS Financial Services Symposium. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, and I am super excited for this next conversation, not only because he's wearing glitter, but because he's brilliant. Please welcome to the stage, Junta. Thank you so much for being here with me today.

Junta Nakai

>> Thank you for having me.

>> This is going to be such a fun chat to start the morning. Topic of this conversation is surviving and thriving in gen AI. Lots of people feeling really overwhelmed right now, also excited. There's hype, there's overwhelm. What are you seeing? You must be seeing a lot.

Junta Nakai

>> I think gen AI has the ability to really transform financial services in ways that it hasn't been able to transform in 20 or 30 years. So if you think about how you interact with your bank or how you interact with your insurance company, I would imagine it probably hasn't changed in 20 or 30 years.

>> No.

Junta Nakai

>> And if you think about how you watch a movie or how you buy something, that has transformed massively over that period of time. I think what gen AI is probably going to enable financial services companies to do is to really innovate the experience that you have and ultimately improve your NPS scores if you're a banker or an insurance company because, like you just said, I read the study maybe a few months ago that said the average Gen Z person would rather go to the dentist than to their bank branch. So the experience is not very pleasant for a lot of people and I think being able to do personalization, being able to give new types of advice, that's going to transform the way people interact with their financial service institutions going forward. So lots of excitement and I think there's going to be massive benefits from that.

>> There is a lot of excitement and that's an incredible data point. Oh my gosh. The dentist versus... I would rather go to the ATM than go to the dentist if we're really picking. But shout out to Gen Z. I say this with love, financial services is not always known as the fastest moving industry when it comes to technology adoption due to governance and regulation. How is it different now with the AI hype curve than saying we saw other digital transformation?

Junta Nakai

>> So I think that AI has become a CEO level initiative, and I call this kind of the gen AI theater curve, which is ChatGPT comes out, people get really excited, every CEO says we're now an AI company, and now there's a lot of press about how they're doing this and it's wonderful. But then we're kind of in the next phase where it's not just the theatrics of talking about it. There is now difficult decisions that have to be made about how are we going to modernize our tech stack? How are we going to democratize data and AI across the organization? And then how are we going to actually transform? So it's all good because it's actually led to a chain of events where people are now rethinking, well, what do we order the decisions that need to make more upstream in the tech stack to be able to enable all these different things. So this is what's happening. And as a result of that, at Databricks, financial services has become our single biggest vertical and one of the fastest growing verticals. And I've been here for five, six years, if you asked me in 2019, is financial services is going to be the largest vertical in the near future, I probably would've said no because we're a cloud native company. And back then there wasn't a whole lot of, I would say if you're still early in the cloud journey back then, but fast-forward to today, I think CEOs and executives realized that if we're going to play in this AI space and if AI is really important for us, then we have to be on the cloud, we have to democratize data, we have to have a modern platform. And these are kind of the tailwinds that we see right now in financial services.

>> It is interesting and it's nice to see that progression. So do you think it's in response to the technical revolution that we're having right now, that this has become that number one vertical for you?

Junta Nakai

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think there's two reasons for this, right? One is that the single biggest driver of expenses for any financial service company is people. So if people are the single biggest expense item, you want to get the most out of your people, you want to increase productivity. And if you think about generative AI, and we track this all the time, the vast, vast majority of generative AI use cases and financial services are just for internal uses. It's not necessarily to drive revenues right now, it's stretch to get people more productive. So if your biggest asset is people, generative AI has an ability to increase the productivity of people, so it is kind of a no-brainer to focus on this. The second thing is that the revenue pool hasn't really increased in financial services for a very long time. So the last two years, we've had this massive tailwind of interface going up, and that just means that banks were more profitable. But my guess is over the next two or three years, interest rates are probably not going to be at the same elevated level as they are today, so the banks are going to have to find new sources of revenue, new ways to interact with their customers, new products to sell people. So this is where that revolution is going to be powered by. And that's one of the reasons why there's such a big focus on the tech decisions you need to make in order to power those things.

>> So what is going to change from a banking perspective? What is our new banking experience going to be like then?

Junta Nakai

>> I think everything is going to change, actually. So I think the future of money is probably going to be three things. It's going to be inclusive, it's going to be instant, and it's going to be invisible. Okay? And what I mean by that is just inclusiveness is there's millions and millions of people in the United States, for example, that are unbanked or underbanked because the way things work today, you kind of have to be part of the financial service ecosystem to be a customer of financial services. So I have a colleague who just moved to the United States. I'm sure he is a very credit worthy person, but in the first credit card he got, his credit limit was a hundred dollars. If you think about that, the data exists to be able to serve this person, so there's a way to become more inclusive of that. Instant is exactly what I said before. If you can watch a movie, any movie you want instantly, why does it take you 45 days to get a mortgage? So that's another thing. And the part of the last part is invisible. What I simply mean by that is maybe you took an Uber here this morning, right? You got in and you left. You didn't even think about paying. I think increasingly, payments and financial services is going to just be part of a lot of the experiences and software and things that you interact with, and I think that presents massive opportunities and challenges for incumbents, right? So that's kind of the way I think things are going to evolve over the next few years, but it's going to be really exciting because we're going to have lots of innovation that in a sector we historically haven't had a whole lot of innovation, to your point.

>> You're getting me excited about banking, which I can't say I've been excited about in a hot minute. So since you get to see a lot of different companies approaching this, does it feel like the entire industry is on this wavelength, or do you see, and you don't have to name names, but do you see some folks adopting quicker? It sounds like this will be a dramatically different banking experience and payment experience, frankly.

Junta Nakai

>> It varies. So I kind of think about it in three different steps, as I mentioned before. First part is the modernization of your technology stack. Second thing is democratization of data and AI through your organization. And the last part is transformation. So if I had to put a number on it, the vast majority of our customers, or just banks or insurance companies in general, are still in that modernization phase. They're trying to figure out how do we get things out into the cloud, how do we bring modern tools, how do we get the most out of the data, et cetera. So I would imagine the vast majority of our company is there, and then there's a handful of companies that are now democratizing data and AI. I think there's massive returns for that. And then on the transformation side, we work with a lot of joint customers with AWS from JP Morgan to Northwestern Mutual to . they're doing incredible things and they have very forward-thinking leaders, they have a modern tech platform, and I think there's going to be, over the next few years, a big difference between the early adopters and the laggers in their ability to drive profits and gain market share in the market over the next few years.

>> Interesting. So it's going to be a whole new ballgame. What experience do you hope you never have to have banking in the future?

Junta Nakai

>> I think this is what I said before, it's the time delay, and it's also kind of the intrusiveness in a sense. So imagine you want life insurance, and that's a pretty intrusive process today. You have to answer all these different things.

>> I have life insurance and I know exactly what you're talking about.

Junta Nakai

>> Get a blood test, you have to do all this. But if you kind of think about it, why do you need to do that? If you have data on a population, you have lots of customers, actuarial science, you could probably make decent underwriting decisions pretty quickly without being that intrusive into someone's personal life to get life insurance. So I think that's one of the things that will happen is that data and AI is going to power new types of experiences that's going to make it much more pleasant. So going back to that dentist, just like you've already been converted. You can't wait to go to a bank branch now or insurance agent. So I think that's hopefully what will happen, which I don't have to deal with anymore.

>> I do like that though. It's a less invasive and it can be a really violating experience. I'm an entrepreneur and I remember going to try and co-sign on my mom's mortgage to help her out, and the bank looked at my income like it didn't matter, even though it was more than a peer who would've been with a standard paycheck. And so hopefully there will be ways where that credibility is validated with a less invasive process here, not a blood test, whatever. You've mentioned the term democratizing data a couple of different times. When we talk about how democratization of AI and a lot of things, what does it mean from a Databricks perspective to democratize data?

Junta Nakai

>> It's providing the power of data and analytics to a much bigger group of folks at your organization than before. So if you think about an average company today, so let's say there's a company of 10,000 people. How many people can do data in AI today of those 10,000? I would imagine a couple hundred. It's a very small percentage. What I mean by democratization is that to become a data forward or data-driven company, you cannot just have people in this small silo being able to interact and curate and get insights from the data. You need to have the entire organization being able to do that. So that's what I mean by that. And the real democratization factor is going to be the innovations that we've seen in gen AI, right? So imagine if you had to get a dashboard, and in the past you had to ask somebody in the database team, you had to know-

>> You basically got to bribe your BI guy.

Junta Nakai

>> Yeah, you need to know stuff. But imagine today, especially within Databricks, you could ask Databricks to say, "Hey, create me a chart of the stock price for this company over the last three months." You don't need to rely on others. And that's what you mean by the democratization. And that's incredibly important in financial services because the two most important asset that any financial service company has today, I think is two things. It's just data and your people. That's it. And maybe 10 years ago that was different. 10 years ago you might've said, capital and our scale, so number of branches and how much money we have maybe have been the most important thing. And I'm not saying those are not important anymore. I'm just saying to add your data and your people together on top of the foundation that you built, that's incredibly powerful. So I think that's what's happening actually.

>> It is. Isn't it an exciting time to be at Databricks?

Junta Nakai

>> Absolutely.

>> We're excited for your show next week.

Junta Nakai

>> Yes, we're excited to have you.

>> Are you going to have any big announcements you can tease for us?

Junta Nakai

>> I think you can wait.

>> You're going to have to wait. You have to wait.

Junta Nakai

>> A little bit. But yeah, there's going to be well over 10,000 people there. It's in person. It's going to be fantastic.

>> Oh, it is going to be. I am super excited. Okay. So next time we're at AWS Financial Services Symposium, a year from now, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say yet today?

Junta Nakai

>> I would hope to say that a lot of the use cases, as I mentioned earlier, most gen AI use cases today are happening for internal productivity purposes. I would hope to say a year from now that many FSI's have started to use gen AI and the power of gen AI to power revenue, new sources of revenue, new products. I think we're still in the early phases of that. And I would like to say, for example, your banking application that you have on your phone. Right now, there's basically no AI in there. A year from now, I would imagine that AI is going to be in every software. Gen AI is going to be in every software. So the way you interact just with your banking application is going to be completely different. So a year from now, I would hope that we would have incredible experiences that we could share and reminisce about a year ago and be like, can you imagine a year ago we had to do this because we could do this today? And that's going to be powered, hopefully, by Databricks and AWS on the background.

>> Well, we look forward to that. Last opportunity I'm going to give you, you own a wonderful watering hole in Brooklyn. Shout out. If folks are interested in sake, where can they find you when you're not doing this?

Junta Nakai

>> So I'm a part owner of America's largest craft sake brewery called Brooklyn Kura. It's based in Sunset Park in Industry City in Brooklyn. It's distributed nationwide. And I love it because it's kind of the opposite of Databricks, right? If you think about it, it's kind of like Databricks in the business of driving massive innovation, completely changing how things are done. Sake is a process that's a thousand years old that basically hasn't changed in a thousand years and probably not going to change in the next thousand years because it's a very manual process. I love being exposed to those two kind of polar opposite dichotomies, and I think it gives me my left brain and my right brain ability to go into overdrive. But yes, it's available in a lot of places.

>> I love that. We'll have to have a conversation, maybe theCUBE after dark, about the intersection of sake, data, and AI. Junta, thank you so much for spending the time with me this morning.

Junta Nakai

>> Thanks for having me.

>> Fantastic start of the day, and we can't wait to be at your event next week.

Junta Nakai

>> Awesome.

>> And thank all of you for tuning in to our fantastic all-day coverage. We've got 15 different segments here at AWS Financial Services Symposium. We're here in New York City. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Junta Nakai | Databricks

>> The AWS Financial Services Symposium, presented by theCUBE.

Junta Nakai

>> Thank you for having me.

Junta Nakai

>> No.

Junta Nakai

>> So what is going to change from a banking perspective? What is our new banking experience going to be like then?

Junta Nakai

>> Interesting. So it's going to be a whole new ballgame. What experience do you hope you never have to have banking in the future?

Junta Nakai

>> I have life insurance and I know exactly what you're talking about.

Junta Nakai

>> You basically got to bribe your BI guy.

Junta Nakai

>> It is. Isn't it an exciting time to be at Databricks?

Junta Nakai

>> Absolutely.

>> We're excited for your show next week.

Junta Nakai

>> Yes, we're excited to have you.

>> Are you going to have any big announcements you can tease for us?

Junta Nakai

>> I think you can wait.

>> You're going to have to wait. You have to wait.

Junta Nakai

>> A little bit. But yeah, there's going to be well over 10,000 people there. It's in person. It's going to be fantastic.

>> Oh, it is going to be. I am super excited. Okay. So next time we're at AWS Financial Services Symposium, a year from now, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say yet today?

Junta Nakai

>> I love that. We'll have to have a conversation, maybe theCUBE after dark, about the intersection of sake, data, and AI. Junta, thank you so much for spending the time with me this morning.

Junta Nakai

>> Thanks for having me.

>> Fantastic start of the day, and we can't wait to be at your event next week.

Junta Nakai

>> Awesome.